Today in Digital Marketing - Here’s Your CTA: [LISTEN NOW]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, here they come, the world's first voice coupons. Also, California takes a hard line on marketers who run afoul of its new privacy legislation. Yes, Google text ads are gone, at least for some people. And the one simple change to your Instagram content strategy that will get you more engagement. It's Monday, August 31st, 2020. Happy Language Day, Moldova. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. When you run a Facebook ad, an ad that directs people to a website, one of the options you get

Starting point is 00:00:37 on the ad setup screen is whether you want a CTA. A CTA is a call to action button. Most of the time people use learn more, but there are all sorts available. Book now, get show times, send message, and a couple of dozen more. You don't have to use a CTA button on your link ad, but most digital marketers have come to believe that you'll get better results when there's a button that directly tells people the action you want them to take. But is that assumption true? Those beautiful bastards at Agorapulse's social media lab have tested it, and I'll have the answer later in

Starting point is 00:01:13 today's episode. More bad news coming for people who run marketing for bricks and mortar stores. A new study of American consumers by Amersys has found that 62% of people polled said no amount of safety measures will convince them to shop in physical stores this Black Friday. In fact, when asked directly, do you plan to shop in stores? Only 4% said yes. 28% said they'll do all their holiday buying online. So if you don't have your e-commerce website set up or your email list in shape, start now. There is a tiny glimmer of hope.

Starting point is 00:01:54 A small number of people said if your prices are cheaper than what they find online, then they will take the risk and buy from you in store. But that small number? Fewer than one in five shoppers. We are starting to see the first lawsuits emanating from the California Consumer Privacy Act. As a refresher, this state legislation says there's a bunch of data you can't collect from California residents in your marketing efforts. And if you do, you open yourself up to enforcement. Enforcement that

Starting point is 00:02:25 apparently has now started. Quoting Streetfightmag.com, the enforcement period began July 1st and two months later, numerous firms have received letters from the Attorney General's office about non-compliance. Multiple major companies, including Walmart, Sephora, and Ring, have been hit with class action lawsuits, unquote. One expert they quoted for their article said, quote, it's speculated that California's attorney general will go after the low-hanging fruit rather than targeting a specific industry. CCPA enforcement will be centered on egregious violators, for example, those that do not have a prominent privacy policy link on their website, no do not sell my data

Starting point is 00:03:06 button, and no visible mechanisms to allow customers to exercise their privacy rights, unquote. If this is the first time you're hearing of this and you do market to people in California, it is worth doing a quick Google search for CCPA. This applies regardless of what country you're in. If you're in Canada, this whole thing stresses you out. You may want to search for the other CCPA, the Canadian Counseling and Psychotherapy Association. Is it just me or are the new developments in digital marketing just getting creepy? Take the new ad running right now on Peacock. That's NBC's streaming service. It's for the shampoo brand Suave, made by Unilever

Starting point is 00:03:51 and sold by Target, among others. The ad listens to the microphone on the device people are watching on and asks them to say the words, save with Suave. And if they do, they get a $5 coupon to buy it at Target. NBC calls this an on-command ad and says it's better than asking people to remember a toll-free number or a website URL. Like it or not, these will probably be fairly commonplace in the coming years. Think about all the voice-reliant devices making their way into consumers' homes. Alexa, Siri, Portal, Google Assistant. Even if

Starting point is 00:04:26 you don't have those, many TV remote controls these days have voice recognition. Comcast's X1 and Flex service has this. In Canada, Shaw's Blue Curve uses it. As for those streaming sites that are funded by advertising rather than a Netflix-type subscription model, that category's ad revenue was up 31% last quarter compared to Q2 the previous year. Instagram, as you know, has three media formats. Actually, did you know that? There are photos, videos, and the third, the carousel,

Starting point is 00:05:03 a group of up to 10 media that people can swipe through. Carousels are easy to post in the third, the carousel, a group of up to 10 media that people can swipe through. Carousels are easy to post in the app, but that format is not yet in the Instagram API, meaning that if you're trying to post a carousel through your account on, say, Hootsuite or Buffer or Gropulse or Spout Social or whatever, that service will politely tell you how to do it manually using the Instagram app. Well, now a new study that looked at more than 22 million posts says, actually, it's probably worth the extra effort. The new research comes from Social Insider. Of those 22 million posts, they say about 3 million were carousel, and they found carousels generated the most engagement. Not a huge lift, mind you, but a lift. In their data set, they found carousels had an average engagement rate per post of 1.92%.

Starting point is 00:05:51 In second place, I know you think I'm going to say videos here, but no, actually images in second place at 1.74%. Despite everyone saying video first, that format only garnered a 1.45% rate. Again, not huge differences. But when they looked at how many slides were in each carousel, they found something even more interesting. When all 10 carousel slides were used, engagement climbed to 2%, and yet only about 1 out of 16 carousel posts maxed out at 10. Quoting searchenginejournal.com,

Starting point is 00:06:29 quote, engagement drops off after 3 slides, though interestingly picks up again at 8 slides and above. According to the data, if you're going to post a carousel with more than 3 slides, you might as well go all out and make it 8 to 10. Also, a combination of images and videos in the same carousel is found to generate the highest engagement rate per post, 2.33%, unquote. And finally, according to the study, carousels with messages that encourage users to swipe left did increase engagement a bit, and only about 5% of carousels use this messaging. So, to recap, the perfect Instagram posts, it seems, at least right now, is a carousel with 10 slides, a mix of videos and images,

Starting point is 00:07:13 and where you say, swipe left in the text. If you use Google Ads, you may have woken up this morning to a bit of a shock. The option to create text ads is gone. So put down the pitchfork and the torch. This isn't happening for everyone, at least not yet. Google confirms it's testing removing that option to encourage people to use an RSA instead. An RSA, a responsive search ad, despite its title, it doesn't mean it's going to look good on both mobile and desktop.

Starting point is 00:07:45 That's usually what we digital marketers think when we hear the word responsive. No, in the case of Google ads, they mean an ad where you give it a bunch of different headlines and body copies, and it will try to figure out which variation will get you the better results. Most people in the space believe Google will eventually just retire regular old school text ads entirely. And this test certainly supports that theory. If you find yourself in the test and you still want to create text ads, there is a workaround. Create a campaign, go to your ad group, and you'll find a small link in the ad group saying switch back to text ads. Again, you'll only find this on the ad group page. Google isn't the only platform to offer RSAs.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Microsoft has them too. And today they released some data on how theirs perform. They say brands that use their RSAs saw an increase of 13% in clicks, 16% in conversions, and 6% in conversion rate. And that brings us to the lightning round. You may have noticed on Sunday morning a number of websites were down. Maybe your brand's website was down, apparently all because of CenturyLink, a big internet service provider, went down. Apparently those issues have been resolved now. It is easier now to resize your tiles in Hootsuite Analytics.

Starting point is 00:09:02 You just hover over the bottom right corner and drag to your desired size. Google has removed historical data older than three years in the AdSense dashboard. It's not Google Ads, that's the AdSense platform. And why? Well, it depends on what part of Google you ask. Their support page says it'll improve the site's speed and usability. The announcement said it was done to have more accurate reports. I'm sure you'll agree with me that neither are true,

Starting point is 00:09:26 and the real reason was cost savings somehow. And Google search engineer John Mueller this weekend again busted a common myth about SEO that you may have heard. He said, again, that word count is not a ranking factor, nor is it indicative of quality. He says Google can rank short content just fine. Oh, and for the Agorapulse study on CTA buttons, their social media lab tested ad posts without and with CTAs

Starting point is 00:09:54 and found that ads without a call-to-action button performed better than those with. I'd venture to say that's the opposite of what most digital marketers assume. If you're a numbers person, they spent 750 bucks for each of the two ad sets. Ads with a button got 586 clicks. Without, 639. Ads with the button got about 43,000 reach. Ads without got more than 48,000. and the average cost per click was 16 cents cheaper on ads without that call to action button. There's a link to this episode's description

Starting point is 00:10:31 if you'd like to read the full study or to listen to a special episode with the Agorapulse social media lab director where he talked with me about how companies like yours can set up their own tests. You will find that in our Slack community. It's free to join. Just go to todayindigital.com slash slack. Also in the exclusive content channel there, extended interviews

Starting point is 00:10:52 with an expert in the TikTok content algorithm and a Google My Business consultant who manages thousands of GMB profiles. Again, it's all in our Slack community. Go to todayindigital.com slash slack or just tap the link in this episode's notes. Romania and Ukraine. Most people there actually speak Romanian. In fact, they used to call this Romanian Language Day, but Moldovan is, if not its own language, then certainly an established dialect of Romanian. That's why the holiday was renamed. The date is not arbitrary. It was on August 31st in 1989 that the then-Soviet government of Moldova caved into pressure from the Moldovan people to officially adopt the Moldovan dialect of Romanian as the state language. And that's it for today. I hope your weekend was restful. I'm Todd Mathen. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Here’s Your CTA: [LISTEN NOW]

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